48 Pillars 2021 by Arc Gallery

February 27 - April 3, 2021

Exhibition Statement

48 Pillars was inspired by a chance encounter at Flax with a close-out sale of deep vertical panels, 48” x 12” x 1 5/8”. 24 local Bay Area artists will produce two pieces each on these identically sized panels that will exactly ring the gallery – 48 works total. This is the 5th Annual iteration of this exhibition at Arc Gallery. Along with our iconic FourSquared exhibition, this is essentially an exercise in "structural constraint". In both exhibitions, the artists are unconstrained in subject matter except to the extent that works need to be a series; but they are constrained in format. One might expect that constraining format would constrain creativity. Our experience has been the opposite - creativity has been unleashed. The results have been visually stunning. Michael Yochum, Curator

Participating Artists Amy Ahlstrom

Ina Morava

Michael Beckler

Stephen Namara

Tyrell Collins

Jann Nunn

Rachel Dawson

Erik Parra

Elvira Dayel

Jenny Phillips

Matt Frederick

Sawyer Rose

Peggy Gyulai

William Salit

Carol Jessen

Valerie Scott

Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband

E. P. Sousa

Lisa Levine

Marcia Stuermer

Michelle Mansour

Debra Walker

Michael McConnell

Pat Wipf

ONLINE ZOOM RECEPTION: Saturday, February 27th, 7-8pm ARTIST TALK & CLOSING RECEPTION: Saturday, April 3rd, 12-3pm

Amy Ahlstrom

I am a conceptual textile artist creating narratives in quilt form. The common thread in my quilts is often text; I utilize words to convey meaning and also as graphic elements. I use my background as a graphic designer to create my art; I design my quilts digitally, then make paper patterns and cut the images by hand. My quilts are made of silk and cotton pieces fused into a single piece of fabric, then quilted using hand-guided machine quilting; I “draw” on the quilt with thread, moving the quilt under the needle to create intricate patterns. Last year, I made a series of 50 small quilts using depictions of the word “OK” as it relates to mental health; when asked how we are, we too often respond that we are “OK” in order to avoid dealing with or discussing our mental states. My latest works reference living with anxiety and depression amid social and political uprisings during a global pandemic. With my work, I hope to challenge the idea of what a quilt can be, and to inspire the viewer to contemplate the deeper meaning I am conveying through silk and cotton. For 48 Pillars, I created the diptych New Day at the end of 2020 to convey both the collective grief of the past year and the cautious hope I feel arriving with the new administration after the 2021 inauguration. I quoted the song Morning Has Broken since it is often played at funerals, yet also hints at the dawning of a new era. The quilts depict a woman from opposite angles shining her full spectrum of light amidst dark clouds; in the background, the rainbow colors hint at brighter days ahead after the rain.

website: www.amyahlstrom.com email: aahlstromart@gmail.com

Amy Ahlstrom

New Day silk and cotton quilts stretched over canvas 48" x 12" panels $3600 diptych

Michael Beckler

My art has been termed abstract illusionism. The pieces are colorful layered forms influenced by his interest in patterns, geometric shapes & shadows. They are graphic, yet at times free flowing, creating complex patterns with the use of layered bright acrylic paints, resin, glass & paper, the end result is an illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional format. I have been interested in iconic statues from the ancient past ever since I started drawing as a child and way before I started to paint. Through the years I have researched these icons and played with different medias to create interesting pieces. This diptych is the beginning of a new series called Icons. It is a combination of several styles I have worked with in past. Specifically, this diptych is based on the following: The Bambara, was a big African tribe formed by farmers, in the region of Bamako, has developed rich themes ranging from the statues of ancestors to those linked to the cult of the dead twins. The theme of the dead twins is also present in the Gurunsi tribe. The Dogon sculptures, whose iconography are different and variable, often develop the theme of the couple, showing the mythologized founders and ancestors. Lobi sculptures are the expression of an original and isolated artistic group, because of their late settlement in the region. The male and female figures are sexually undifferentiated and they are intended to protect from disease or to promote good fortune. Even the statues of a couple in the sexual intent have a magical function, to help the owner in finding a partner.

website: www.msjbart.com email: msjb.art@gmail.com

Michael Beckler

Lobi layered acrylic paint and resin on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $3500 diptych

Tyrell Collins

The structural constraints of this project and the constraints of the pandemic (the death count, police brutality, social outrage, governmental instability, wildfires, unbreathable air, fraught election and insurrection) were an intense combination. As always I used my practice to attend to my interior life and to find balance and refuge in the process. I tried to move my work forward, reorienting my approach from a horizontal to a vertical format. The result creates a space and suggests a light source, both determined by the extension of the height and the compression of the width of the panels, that are new for my work. I’m grateful to have had this project during the past year as both a stimulating creative challenge and as an opportunity to memorialize 2020.

website: www.tyrellcollins.com email: tyrellcollins@earthlink.net

Quantum Entanglement (Radiant Orange)

Tyrell Collins

colored pencil on museum board (framed) 48" x 12" panels $10,000 diptych

Rachel Dawson

In my art practice, I make connections between my artistic process and metaphysical processes. I seek to render the invisible visible and to materialize the immaterial. With paintings and sculptures, I address visual perception, belief, and otherworldly phenomena, while also engaging in absurdity and the space of the imagination. I knew that 2020 was the year I needed to make colors and crystals pushing through the surface of my painting. My painting, Energy Cleanse introduces crystals in relation to Yves Klein blue paint from his estate. Klein saw this blue as spiritually enlightening, a paint that represents the vast expanse of the universe. There is something energetic in this hue, but there is also something slightly unpredictable in its demeanor. Emerging from below the painted surface, the quartz and citrine crystals emanate positivity, joy, and promise to clear all imbalances. I bridge “seeing the unseen” with my process of making art. I’m also interested in how ideas of wellness are attached to a “feminine” space, such as the history of witchcraft and its connection to agency, medicines, and power objects. As an artist, I see my role as a medium, much like the way women were conduits for the paint in Klein’s paintings. In the studio, painting is meditation, a place I come to remember to breathe, where I can think through brushstrokes. Past work featured various holes, caverns, and voids. I often think about the surface or what we can see and wonder what unsettling things are going on under the surface. Influenced by the work of painter Agnes Pelton and I mirror her concern with the metaphysical properties of color and their ability to bring the viewer into a state of enlightenment.

website: www.racheldawson.com email: rdawson79@gmail.com

Rachel Dawson

Energy Cleanse oil and acrylic on canvas mounted on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $2000 each; $3200 diptych

Elvira Dayel

When confined in the body - spirit rises higher. When sheltered at home - vision expands. When defined by parameters of long & narrow, art defies constraints in order to create rhythm, bring unity, accentuate contrast, seek new forms. Every thought & decision is in the linework. At times it longs to please the viewer, sometimes it dares to anger them. The Poetry Reading Poetry diptych is a visual play of interlocking fields of a limited-color palette, of two bodies whose outlines overlap; they are integrated. The male figure is seated & in his hands he's holding an electronic screen. She has one too, it is reflected in her face. In the times like these, when we all struggle for air, making art is my oxygen. It's the breathing medium in which to exist. It's uncompromising & unapologetic. Life throws curve-balls and poses questions which my art-making tries to address, without ever fully answering them. It usually points me in a direction, gives a thread to follow... In my work it is usually the urban landscape that is deconstructed, flattened and re-assembled. My vision of the world wants to be all-encompassing, I like to look at the world globally yet deal with it specifically through figures & current issues. Occasionally a human figure or multiple figures inhabit a given artwork. My interest lies in perceiving our environment as a construct, where my re-invented landscape becomes a new reality. Each piece is its own universe - a macrocosm or a microcosm. It is reduced, calm, eerie & left alone. Each piece, while in the process of creation, is a deep and slow process of contemplation. It’s a slow cooker – no rush.

website: www.elviradayel.art email: elvira.dayel@gmail.com

Poetry Reading Poetry

Elvira Dayel

soft pastel drawing on watercolor paper mounted on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $4400 diptych

Matt Frederick

Lately I have been painting scenes of my neighborhood and the surrounding area. This diptych is a view from Potrero Hill, looking east up 19th Street from De Haro.

email: frederma@gmail.com

19th and Wisconsin

Matt Frederick

oil on wood panel 48" x 12" panels SOLD

Peggy Gyulai

Music has been a source of inspiration and a structural theme for my abstract paintings throughout my painting life. For this project, I was excited to rediscover Maurice Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, a series of eight short but powerful musical sketches stitched together into a longer work for orchestra in 1912. It was an unconventional composition at the time — and to our modern ears today. The music has a manic beauty, with spinning Viennese waltz rhythms and glittering harmonies which at times seem about to veer off the dance floor and crash in a dramatic pile-up. I chose Valse #6 Assez vif (Very lively) and #7 Moins vif (Less lively) to paint as a pair so they could converse and perhaps dance in parallel, reflecting some of the drama and motion of their atmospheric musical inspirations. Note: These paintings are AR-enabled with sound. To view the augmented reality extension, please download the free app Artivive onto your smart device (iOS or Android), allow permission to use the camera, and point the app at the artwork. This will work in-person at the gallery or using the screen or printed images.

website: www.peggygyulai.com email: peggygyulai@mac.com

Ravel Valse #6 Assez vif (Very lively)

Peggy Gyulai

Ravel Valse #7 Moins vif (Less lively)

pigment dispersion on canvas 48" x 12" panels SOLD

Carol Jessen

San Francisco attracts artists from around the world seeking to explore the city, feel the city, and breath the city in the hopes of finding that perfect composition for which there are many. The urban landscape has been my oeuvre for over 30 years. As a teenager I would catch a bus from Oakland to San Francisco and make my way to North Beach, the Haight or Union Square. Enraptured by the architecture, the hills rising from the bay and the ever-present fog wafting through the neighborhoods, I knew I would move here some day. People look at my paintings and ask, “what street this?” My reply is: Stanyan Street, Leavenworth Street, Noe Street, Market Street, etc. My catalogue of references is extensive as I have walked and photographed so many parts of San Francisco. When I create a painting I no longer copy exactly what I see but rather put together the parts to create an interesting and dynamic composition. Reinventing and capturing the fleeting moods of the city transformed by fog, rain, light and darkness and watching the drama unfold in atmospheric changes as day recedes into the formless abstractions of night is my continuing inspiration and passion. Through manipulation of color, design, nuance and form, I am searching for that magic place between realism and abstraction.

website: www.caroljessen.com email: carol@caroljessen.com

Nightfall

Carol Jessen

oil on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $4200 diptych

Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband

Ellen and Steve are life partners and collaborators in fine art photography. Their co-productions evidence Steve’s eye for geometry and light elevated by Ellen’s interest in memory, meaning and color. Their series Side by Side includes strong, vertical slices of panoramic reality from the Bay Area to the Atacama desert in South America. These narrow portals reflect the artists’ experience of sheltering in place for nearly a year during a global pandemic amidst surging inequities and horrific injustice. Without travel and with restricted contact with friends and family, they felt their ever growing global perspective suddenly narrowed, flattened and muted. In their most recent work, Hawkview I and II, a rolling fog that obscures so much of the landscape appears to be shifting. Longstanding sources of wonder seem to be coming into view again, reflecting the hope and the reality of 2021. With the most vulnerable receiving vaccinations and a redirection of the country in the offing, American optimism, initiative, and balance look to be on the horizon, in our sights and in our hearts. The images are presented on Japanese kozo paper, mounted to a wood substrate, and are sealed in a multilayered wax encaustic.

website: portfolio.goldband.com email: ellen.konar@gmail.com

Hawkview 1 & 2 archival pigment print infused with encaustic wax mounted on wood panel 48" x 12" panels SOLD Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband

Lisa Levine

This diptych is part of the Somewhere series in which I am working with the notion of place. My sense of the places I know and the places I discover is constructed from an amalgamation of different sights and experiences over time. The works in this series are complex compositions that photographically describe fragments of information, time, and space. I digitally combine these fragments to formulate my impression of a place because I find that no one image and no singular discreet slice of time can describe the sensation of any particular place for me. I must construct it from multiple perspectives and moments. Collaging historic images into these works expands the notion of time and space further. I use a flattened perspective densely compressing multiple views and moments within a richly complex surface. The picture plane becomes a vibrant, kinetic space where these elements merge into a landscape without perspective. I am particularly interested in the industrial and urban landscape; power plants, bridges, shipyards, shipping ports and the vibrant architecture of cities are most appealing to me. These places have a unique aesthetic, sense of color and rhythm.

website: www.lisalevinephoto.com email: LisaLevinePhoto@yahoo.com

Rise Up, SF # 1

Lisa Levine

Rise Up, SF # 2

pigment prints mounted on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $1000 each; $1700 diptych

Michelle Mansour

My work is a meditation on the space between science and spirituality. Through the lens of perception, fluctuating between the miniscule and the grandiose, we find fear and wonder of the unknown, the invisible, and the uncontrollable. Based initially on investigating the microscopic world of the body’s interior where beauty and illness mingle in the same fluids and membranes, my work has become a broader ontological reflection of where the physical and the metaphysical intersect. Growing up in a family of scientists, this focus intensified when my mother — both a nurse and devout Catholic — was diagnosed with and lost to cancer. Forging a connection between the microcosmic and macrocosmic, the paintings push an imaginative space, exploring tensions and relationships between corporeal and mystical, body and mind. My process includes layering translucent color and building up a symmetrical system of intersecting strands of cells. In applying thousands of tiny dots, I create an ethereal space where constellations gather and disperse in an endless cycle. Particles accumulate, and I layer globules of silicone to emerge from the surface as tissue-like prayer beads. The result is the juxtaposition of jewel-like fields and manipulated surfaces, creating a tactile element for counting countless meditations. This exponentially cyclical process of repeating marks becomes a devotional practice in contemplating the exquisite balance between certainty and faith, presence and loss.

website: www.michellemansour.com email: michelle@michellemansour.com

Pillars of Clarity and Devotion

Michelle Mansour

acrylic, ink, and silicone on muslin on wood panel 48" x 12" panels Clarity $2200; Devotion SOLD

Michael McConnell

As artists we constantly change and transition, experiment with new techniques and ideas, and discover new ways to use color and mediums to create a dialogue with the viewer. In this work I am investigating the space that falls in between abstraction and realism. Using colors and shapes to create landscapes through abstraction. These landscapes are grounded in reality by the more realistic animals that reside in them.

website: www.michaelmcconnellart.com email: poopingrabbit@yahoo.com

Coyote Canyon

Michael McConnell

Pelican Beach

acrylic on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $1800 each; $3000 diptych

Ina Morava

Who are we when we sleep? .. What are our dreams? Whether it is chaotic fantasies, or the path to understanding oneself, the connection with our inner "I", the opportunity to be real soaring childish selves, which, as I believe, each person has deep inside pure and light, like a newborn. This inner light is in each of us, and when we become closer to it in dreams, we are again innocent and pure and truthful, and as if a little bit holy. "And the smile on the lips of the sleeping shone with a gentle halo .." ___ The technical process is based on an old icon-making technique that gives amazingly durable surfaces and textures you can see and touch with your fingers. It includes multiple stages: - priming the wooden boards - covering with the gauze - covering the prepared boards with several coats of gesso, waiting for each layer to dry, and creating a beautifully aged surface looking like a piece of a time-worn wall - old-school egg tempera painting - varnishing the ready fresco

website: www.instagram.com/ina_morava_art email: inessmorova@gmail.com

Sleeping

Ina Morava

egg tempera on gesso board 48" x 12" panels SOLD

Stephen Namara Although The Eyes Have It is not a deliberate reflection on the year that was 2020, I began working on it a few months into the San Francisco “shelter-in-place” health order and that undoubtedly influenced the way the piece was approached. The paintings are more about what I am trying to say, and finding a way to say it. Sure, I can draw, I can paint; it is not the skill in the end, it is a vehicle. These are “portraits” of artists at the shipyard who, quite reasonably, I wouldn’t recognize in a photo line-up, because I have not seen them without their masks for the entirety of our acquaintance, but for their eyes and forehead. One of the pillars features something I have noticed lately, that rather than make visual contact with me, my sitters avert their gaze and drift in introverted thoughts and reveries. This is in contrast to the other panel painted earlier in the pandemic, where they would stare at me suspiciously. Hope, despair, sorrow, disbelief, fear, pity, compassion, anger, acquiescence; all feed into the work somehow. The works conceals and reveals at the same time. I use a process of subtraction and addition, using layers of oil and dry pigment, and then stripping some of stratum to reveal the final image. As the elements and the lockdown epoch leave their mark upon all of us, this practice of adding and subtracting bestows upon the “pillars” a literal and metaphorical depth. To locate the work in a specific point in time, I surrounded the “portraits” with newsprint - actual pages out of the San Francisco Chronicle.

website: https://www.stephennamara.com/ email: stephen@stephennamara.com

The Eyes Have It #1 & #2

Stephen Namara

oil and newsprint on wood panel 48" x 12" panels SOLD

Jann Nunn

Although best known for my sculptures, I create artworks using a variety of materials in varying scale – from minute to monumental – in two, three and four dimensions. My artwork typically responds to “place” in the larger sense. Perhaps because I moved an extraordinary number of times as a child, I had an immense need to seek my place in the broader world. I was born a painter and moved to object making as a young adult. From a very early age I knew with certainty that my preferred means of communicating was through visual expression. Selecting just the right material and method, my work is a synthesis of head, heart, and gut. It is personal, sometimes political, and always poetic. Continuum: Dreams and Desires references the formal qualities of my cut paper sculpture series Dreaming of Machu Picchu, with its innumerous layers of information accessible only through the subconscious mind. It is an internal investigation of psyche during this time of unexpected and introspective isolation. As a reflection of life’s continuum, the painting can be arranged end-to-end vertically or horizontally.

website: www.jann-nunn.com email: jann@jann-nunn.com

Continuum: Dreams and Desires Jann Nunn

oil on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $3500 diptych

Erik Parra

We share experiences of a built environment colored by personal, political and practical realities that often feel simultaneously antagonistic and comforting. I make paintings and drawings that engage the visual tropes of contemporary spaces to reveal and revise the stories embedded in the environments we build. To do this, I draw upon my personal memories of growing up in a “mid-century Modernist house” and conflate those in the studio with more recent direct memories of interiors and design objects to construct engaging hypothetical interiors. Rather than working from direct source material, I construct my images through a process of remembering, drawing, cutting and improvising forms. I consider these elements at every stage, from ideation to execution of the final work. I use both darkness and lightness for dramatic effect as my invented interiors host a range of potential, related conversations. I also channel, through visual interpretation, narrative tensions informed by symbolism mined from the history of painting, existential philosophy, film, horror fiction, extreme music and politics. The paintings in the Externality Study series employ some familiar painting tropes to question and subvert traditional notions associated with the genres of interior and landscape painting. They also draw on writings about social progress by Dr. Cornel West and the surreal nature of light in Magritte’s The Empire of Light series. And like a glass door sliding open, the optical slippage between what appears to be inside versus out, opens up room for complex conversations about what it might look like for an entire culture to make social progress through self-reflection and the relationship between narratives of modernist architecture and their relationship to the marketing of contemporary living. website: www.erikparra.com email: erik@erikparra.com

Externality Study viii Erik Parra

acrylic on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $3250 each; $4600 diptych

Jenny Phillips

My work is about feeling, rather than ideology or narrative. It explores subliminal emotions created by the environments that surround us, and reflects the rhythm of the seasons and the beauty of the commonplace. I use paper, photography, wax, oil paint, watercolor, India inks and acrylic washes, borrowing techniques from printmaking and combining materials in unexpected ways to capture moments in time and a sense of fleeting and fragile beauty. Using the interplay of line work, texture, and color, I balance simplicity of expression with spontaneity of gesture to evoke the essence of the everyday. Inspired by California’s weather extremes of drought and flooding, the Riverbed series evokes California’s parched creeks, which contain a memory of past flowing water and the promise of future rain. The work is created by taking strips of recycled paper, soaking the edges in India ink, and then running the ink-saturated edge across mulberry paper to create marks. The mulberry paper is then cut and embedded in encaustic ground. The contrast between the geometry of the composition and the freeform shapes of the ink is a subtle reminder of the forces of flow and geology that have shaped California’s landscape.

website: www. jennyphillips-studio.com email: jenny@jennyphillips-studio.com

Riverbed Jenny Phillips

on wood panel 48" x 12" panels SOLD

Sawyer Rose

Both sculptural and painterly, the bas-relief forms in Pacific Madrone I & II are clad in scales of silver solder, as if their delicate bodies are growing the armor they need to flourish in our ever more hostile environment. Using the flowing, organic texture of the metal as my primary mark-making medium, there is eloquence and beauty in the act of self-protection. I began these pieces by creating a template shape of the madrone plants in thick copper foil. Next, I laid down the first layer of texture in silver solder-like painting with molten metal. I added dimension to the works by placing beads of solder to create depth and contrast. The pieces were then covered with a rich black patina, and burnished with steel wool to bring out shining highlights on the raised peaks, while leaving dark in the valleys.

website: www.sawyerrose.com email: sawyer@sawyerrose.com

Pacific Madrone I & II Sawyer Rose

silver solder, copper, oil on wood panel 48" x 12" panels SOLD (commissions available)

William Salit

Years of work from the figure—of developing aggressive but sensitive line work and mark-making—led me to further explore the workings of the body, from organic chemistry, physiology, and microbiology to anatomy and dissections of cadavers. Fed by those studies, recent paintings are explorations into the way life assembles itself from small working parts and then evolves and organizes in ever greater levels of complexity. At each level we find independent players all serving their functions: elements assemble, molecules interact, cells join with or hunt other cells, organs coordinate with their organ systems, animals play their roles in ecosystems. And the patterns in which this play happens seem to echo through it all: the porous barriers and exchanges in interstices, the spirals, the try-anything-seewhat-works ethos of evolution. And always expansion and change. These two columns began as a base layer of collaged images that seemed to represent pre-Covid society: marketing imagery, movie posters, and luxe home decorating books. I let these images interact and morph through drawing and painting, and be subsumed in a maelstrom of organic improvisation, in a growth of joints, limbs, tubules, viscera, teeth, animal and plant parts, and microscopic life. It fascinates me that, as I work, an image can be a plant, a body part, a tooth, a bacterium, and slowly become something else entirely. Just as it fascinates me that over time, all these things we create will one day become flora and fauna and eventually just elements again.

website: www.williamsalit.com email: art@wmsalitdesign.com

In my Covidian year William Salit

Conté and acrylic on wood panel 48" x 12" panels SOLD

Valerie Scott

My creativeness starts while listening to music which makes the entire process an endeavor of love and joy. I have been known to dance a little bit around my work which adds to my overall excitement in making my abstract works of art. The weather outside usually plays a big part in how I feel which definitely creeps into my pieces either consciously or subconsciously as does the bustling city life in San Francisco. I delight in painting abstract expressionist art. It’s a process that takes me on a spiritual journey that thrills me to go into my studio with joy in my heart. This diptych was made while sheltering in place and brought me happiness even in this stressful time that all of us are coping with. Just knowing we are all in this pandemic together, I find some inner calmness with and then push myself to find joy in the things that really matter in life. Art has given me that inner peace which I hold dear to my soul.

website: www.vsccollection.com email: veclections@sbcglobal.net

Rejoice I & II Valerie Scott

acrylic on wood panel 48" x 12" panels SOLD

E. P. Sousa

For some time, I have been intrigued with how kinetic art, with its inherent shifts and changes, can be employed to communicate. How it can spark dialogue and reflection. Having recently completed a long and arduous process of public art, which had all manner of constraints; in this work for 48 Pillars I felt freed from constraint. The format itself provided an inspiring container for playful creativity. For this set of panels, I drew inspiration, at first, from the leaves on my neighbor’s willow tree. The leaf shapes blowing in the wind seemed to vibrate. Watching this action caused me to think of eddies in air currents and streams. These forces, not readily seen, cause actions that appear more random than they truly are. Thinking about these ideas then led me on an exploration of chaos, equilibrium, oscillation, feedback loops, and complex repeating and iterative patterns. Ultimately, the journey through beautiful patterns, generated by the math apparent in the natural world, circled back to the leaves on the tree and their appearance of vibration. And finally, led me to a reminder to take time to look with wonder.

website: www.epsousa.com email: beth@epsousa.com

Edge Vibration

E. P. Sousa

steel, brass, aluminum, reclaimed tropical hardwood, acrylic paint 48" x 12" $5400 diptych

Marcia Stuermer

I use cast resin as my primary medium in combination with unexpected materials and processes to capture moments in time and create thought-provoking visual dialogues. Central to my work are the elements of surprise, wonder, and unforeseen beauty along with my desire to convert the commonplace to the sublime. In this Hope Springs Eternal diptych, conceived and created during the pandemic and finished amid the violent US political turmoil of early January 2021, I intentionally limited the resin color palette to an inky black to provide both dramatic ambiance and a visual contrast to the colorful flora embedments. To emulate the look of unfurled scrolls, I incorporated charred wood slabs—reminiscent of the ancient Japanese shou sugi ban preservation technique—at the ends of the panels to further enhance the work’s subtext of renewal and perseverance.

website: www.stuermerstudios.com email: marcia@stuermerstudios.com

Hope Springs Eternal

Marcia Stuermer

hand-cast resin, flora, charred wood 48" x 12" panels $3500 each; $6000 diptych

Debra Walker

as the pandemic came upon our city, i walked the streets - day and night - needing to feel a connection to the world from outside my four walls. from beyond zoom. it was a visual connection that was foreign. it was a quiet, empty connection. in the silence of our city, with the boarded up storefronts block after block, there seemed to be no one aroundthe details abstracted. i saw the city in it's bareness. no longer screaming to be heard, no longer demanding attention. As if the world is what it is. As i painted a visual imprint of looking down california street...looking at the iconic bridge....translating loneliness - i was moving in to my painting.........feeling somewhat distant from it....but moving closer...... and then ....what was covid and insane leadership became an insurrection and an earthquake in our democracy. The image of the columns of the capitol over took my paintings.. as terrorists climbed them in real time. Perspectives trembled. there is a difference between red and blue and night and day; and right and wrong. And now our democracy is fragile — and skewed. we survived.

this time.

website: www.debrawalker.com email: dw@debrawalker.com

As if (reds)

Debra Walker

And now (blues)

oil & mixed media on wood panel 48" x 12" panels $3000 each

Pat Wipf

As an artist, I began using oils, but a fateful drawing trip to France exposed me to pastels. They were so seductive that I put the paints away and bought my first pastels. Recently (at long last), I realized how much of my personal life history has affected how I see life. When I was young, I did competitive ice skating which made me aware of rhythm and how things exist in space. My love of fabric, color and texture comes from a lifetime of sewing. Then you add in being a serious gardener, both in my own space and as a longtime volunteer at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. All these things have, in their own way, contributed to how I perceive the world. My artistic vision has been influenced by particular artists. The lush tactile experience that the Dutch masters portrayed, the cool abstracted forms that intrigued Georgio Morandi, the pattern and color that drove Pierre Bonnard, the rigor and tough investigation of Alice Neel, Avigdor Arikha and Lucien Freud, and the daring composition and pastel mastery of Degas and Mary Cassatt are all special to me. In many ways, an artist is a translator. Our experiences form the basis for what we attempt to present for others to share. My work deals with objects (new to me or old favorites) that I observe in detail. The composition can be formal or seemingly casual - a glimpse captured in passing. The complexity of forms in space, how light defines the relationships between the forms, the amazing subtly of color, and the joy of really seeing my world...all of this is what excites me and keeps me going.

website: www.patwipf.com email: patwipf@mac.com

Canna Forest

Pat Wipf

pastel on ragboard 48" x 12" panels $3800 diptych

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